LG 50PZ950

3D Effect & Experience

This LG uses active shutter glasses to show you 3D images. This is the more costly option for home 3D. The glasses are expensive (approximately $60 a pair). Many people claim to like active shutter 3D images more because there is no resolution loss like you get from passive 3D images. But, because the active shutter glasses are alternately blocking out one eye and then the other to create stereoscopy, you lose half the refresh rate and motion will not be as smooth. Either way, you lose half of something because you need to create two separate moving images from a single screen with limited resources.

Wearing the active glasses on, watching a 3D movie blasting in from our Blu-ray player, we noticed a hefty amount of cross talk that detracted from the 3D experience. Specifically, black and blue colors caused the most crossover between our two eyes, thus detracting from the separated images. The resulting picture was very flat and there were round-the-room headaches caused by our eyes trying to focus on two different depths at once: The plane of the TV screen, and the 3D images jumping out before us. Though 3D experience is a subjective test and hard to gauge scientifically, we can confidently say this was not the most immersive 3D imagery we have seen.

3D Black & White

When you watch 3D, you are watching television with a pair of sunglasses on. You would never do that normally, because it would dim the entire picture you paid so dearly to see. This dimming would destroy the contrast ratio, the selling point that really made you spend that extra money for a high quality television. The results in the chart below show you just how much damage 3D glasses do to an otherwise fantastic showing of lights and darks.

3D Color

In 3D, there were a couple of bursts of color temperature variance that would be noticeable in the dark grays and brightest whites. However, given the vagaries of crosstalk and general discomfort created by 3D, color temperature will be far from your aching brain.

Like the 2D color curves, which were so bad as to be unbelievable at first, we retested these in 3D THX mode for supposed optimized cinema quality. The results you see below are better than 3D THX mode, and the best we could do with our own calibration.

There is clearly a massive amount of processing happening with these colors in 3D, but what the engineers are attempting is unclear. The green curve jumped several times in the brighter part of the spectrum. Peaks are often the result of trying to create more contrast, such that one brightness is significantly brighter than one just before it, making hard edges pop unrealistically. We can imagine this being helpful considering the extreme loss of contrast with the glasses on, but it only happened with the green values, and only half way through the spectrum.

The blue line was by far the most incorrect and baffling. There were two curves here, one lower and one higher. The higher one started as the brightest values begin, and curves in a reasonable fashion, until a giant valley, where it continued along the same curve as what started at the beginning of the chart. We checked these values to make sure that the 50PZ950 didn’t just turn off half way through testing, but there were recorded values well above 0 that followed the slope of the earlier part of the graph. The graph itself was so ugly it was deemed unplublishable. What to make of this, we do not know. Look, we just work here.

The color gamut from 2D to 3D did not change at all. This is actually well done, considering the compensation for whatever tint the glasses may have.

3D Crosstalk

Crosstalk is when some part of an image intended for one eye ends up in the other. Stereoscopy, or 3D imagery, is achieved only by keeping two images separate in either eye. Therefore, anything going between both eyes will detract from the illusion of 3D. Crosstalk was a problem for the LG 50PZ950, showing some of the highest shift percentages of 3D televisions we have seen. The biggest issues were with blue images, worst when adjacent to white images, but when does that happen? Oh yeah, the sky, during the day, with clouds, hmm. Far and away the most crosstalk came with any black areas adjacent to any other colors. So as long as your 3D movie doesn’t take place during the day or at night, you should be okay.

3D Glasses

Despite providing sub par images, the glasses were excellently crafted. For active shutter eye wear, fashion accessories that use some serious technological hardware, they were feather-weighted. Frequently we put on pairs of 3D glasses that would seem to be burdensome for a two-hour, brain sodomizing extravaganza of wonky 3D images, but with these LG models, we could realistically wear and forget about.

The design was less geeksome than most as well. We make no claims to be other than techno dorks, but we understand feeling silly about wearing a colossal pair of nerd goggles around your house. These glasses are slightly less obtrusive, making for a more comfortable, though unsatisfying, viewing experience.

NOTE: Our 3D HDTV testing is under development, which is why these sections have no scores. You caught us mid-rubric. We can collect data and share it with you, but the results in this section have no bearing on the overall score of the television. For more about how we score, read our How We Test article.

Other Models in the Series
For more information on other models in this series, check our Series Comparison Page.
LG 60PZ950 60 in.